I keep running into wonderful young people working their first convention, and they keep not asking me, “What is the secret to all politics?” I am here to tell them anyway. There is a secret theme song to all conventions, and it is in fact the secret theme song of all politics. You listen to the old baseball manager: “This game…is only one half skill. The other half is something else, something bigger.” What he says is incredibly corny and always true. So onward tonight, and save this for when you’re having one of those days. Also, dig the harmony. You Gotta Have Heart!
Huckabee Hits a Homer
Mike Huckabee’s speech is the best of the convention so far. What a fabulous, old fashioned podium-thumper. He has been the only speaker tonight with the size to fill the room, the only one who can read a teleprompter without looking shifty-eyed, the only one with the confidence to go there at length on the meaning of such issues as the president and the Catholic church, and the only one who captured the full attention of the crowd. Just a wonderful speech about the meaning of things. Out of the park.
A Quiet Convention
People are talking about how subdued the floor is. Normally Republicans in convention are whomp-’em, stomp-em full of cheers. They interrupt the speakers too much! But last night Chris Christie said a few lines that you knew he knew would garner big applause, and he got what a young speechwriter this morning called “crickets.” It happened to Ann Romney a few times too. I asked a US senator from the midwest if he’d noticed and he said yes. His staffers, standing with him, nodded and wondered aloud: Is it the high number of Ron Paul supporters, who aren’t that enthused? Maybe, said another, it’s in the nature of Mitt Romney’s supporters: they’re not all that excitable. Anyway the floor is dead. The Romney campaign and the RNC should send out one of their alerts: Everyone, wake up!
Ann Romney and Chris Christie
A read on the first night of the convention:
They lit the candle. They got past the ill luck of the storm and declared there’s a convention going on.
Ann Romney was stunning, sweet, full of enthusiasm, a little shy, a little game for the battle. Her speech was fine. I think the headline was that she and Mitt got married young, lived in modest circumstances and struggled a bit while he studied and tried to get a foothold in business. But it was scattered, full of declarations — “Tonight I want to talk to you about love” — that weren’t built upon but abandoned. Strong as the impression of personal beauty is, I think she missed an opportunity.
Here’s how I see it. I have just spent the past two and a half days talking to people who’ve known Mitt Romney well for ten, twenty and thirty years, even more. They love him, and in all their conversations they say either literally or between the lines, “If only you knew him like I do.” It is their mantra. They mean it, and they are so frustrated. They believe he is a person of unique and natural integrity, a kind man who will give you not only his money but his time, his energy. They see him as a leader. They know the public doesn’t see this. They don’t understand why. And, actually, I don’t blame them, because it really is a bit of a mystery. If he’s so good why can’t his goodness be communicated?
The opportunity Ann Romney missed was to provide first person testimony that is new, that hasn’t been spoken, that hasn’t been in the books and the magazine articles. She failed to make it new and so she failed to make it real.
I’m not sure her speech was a loss but it doesn’t feel like a gain. We’ll see. The real reaction to a highly publicized speech emerges not overnight on twitter but over days and weeks as people chat in the office and on the sidewalk in front of school. So we’ll see what they say, we’ll see how it bubbles up.
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Chris Christie’s speech was big. It was hopeful. It said the American people can turn their country around, that they actually want candidates who speak the truth, that they will follow difficult prescriptions if they seem grounded in reality. Christie always reminds me a little of Jackie Gleason — “To the moon, Alice!” But he is one shrewd political mind, and he actually thinks about the meaning of things. He played the common man Tuesday night but he was high minded, and he beautifully skewered the hypocrites and reactionaries in the teachers’ unions, who have made it so clear to so many the past decade that really, they are all about pensions and bennies, not about students, and if you don’t like the longterm cost of the deals they make with pols you can just avoid the property taxes by selling your house and going to rent somewhere. They don’t care where because there will be a teacher’s union there, too.
So look, all of this was good, and right, and big. But.
Chris Christie is a politician and there’s nothing in it for him, as a New Jersey Republican, as a guy trying to survive and prosper in a Democratic state, in really bringing it to President Obama. He stuck to thoughts on governance. This was worthy.
But you know, this is how the Republican base feels: No one classy and admired like Chris Christie has ever taken it to Obama and been as tough a partisan as, say, Joe Biden, or as amusing and pointed as — well, actually, I can’t think at the moment of a truly pointed and funny Democrat, but whoever that person is would be is the person I mean.
Republicans aren’t really hungry for red meat, that’s not what this is about. They’re hungry for someone who is an elected official at a high level, and who is admired, to push back, to have fun, to stir the blood, to make the case, to get the troops going again.
I want to tell you they marched out of the hall Tuesday night on fire for their side. But I was there and they did not. They walked out like people who weren’t quite sure what to think or how to feel but were hoping for the best because they love their country. A lot.
Christie Preview
From a Chris Christie aide: The governor’s speech will be “positive” in tone, “Republicans and Democrats working together.” He’ll speak briefly about where he comes from, who he is, what his parents taught him. He will make the case that the American people hunger for honesty, that they want candor from their political leaders, that when given the facts of a situation they will back measures that will turn the problem around. He will speak of his experience in New Jersey and apply what he learned there to the nation. It is not an attack speech, he wants to deliver “a much bigger message” about “the future of the party.” He makes the case for Mitt Romney.
Humor, verve? “He’s Chris Christie.” Hint of what’s coming: he spoke to the Michigan delegation on Tuesday and got so wound up he threw in parts of tonight’s speech. He told an aide later he couldn’t help it, “It’s in my head!” How did it go over? “Very well.”
The Storm Before the Calm
The vibe of this convention has been weird. There has been a constant sense of something impending, some doom about to be delivered. What everyone is hungry for, hopeful for, will be so grateful for, is: a sparkling opening at 8 p.m. that will chase the clouds away. A great Christie speech, a line, a joke that lets the crowd let out its pent-up roar. An Ann Romney speech that leaves delegates saying, at 1 in the morning in the bar of the Hyatt, “We did the right thing. We picked the right one.”
We are in Florida, we are near the cape, Neil Armstrong left us this week, and TV has been full of old videotape of rockets lifting. Now more than ever delegates are saying, “Light this candle. Come on and light this thing.”
Bad (and Good) Advice for Speakers
A guy who’s speaking at the convention told me he has been talking to “the professionals.” They told him to speak to the person in the living room, then they told him to speak to the people in the hall. They told him to speak to businessmen, and then they told him no, speak to disaffected women. Speak to this demographic, speak to that one.
All the people who say these things, they are stupid and know nothing. They are mouthing the garbage-speak of received wisdom. People are people, at bottom they have souls, they have a brain, they can hear the sound of something honest, they hate artifice, they can smell it. When you speak to slices of the American people you are slicing America into pieces. Which means you are part of the problem.
‘That Was Smart’
A U.S. senator from the West talking about Paul Ryan: “I think Romney was challenging himself.” Romney knew he had to become a better candidate, knew he needed someone who played a higher policy game, knew he needed someone who prompted him. “It was a self-challenge. And that was smart.”
‘Reagan!’ ‘Olé!’
On the floor of the convention, I was introduced to a guy who’ll be speaking later this week. He isn’t in politics, he has never spoken to a convention, and what he is afraid of is this: He’ll be up there trying to speak, and the crowd will be bopping a big beach ball back and forth. I told him that’s OK if it happens, it sort of takes pressure off him in a way, some people will see his predicament and root for him, and he can sort of calm the crowd down by just being . . . calm, and telling them things it will be helpful for them to hear. I forgot to say: They won’t be bopping a big beach ball across the floor, they’ve done that in the past but between speakers, or before the show begins.
Afterward, a memory. The 1976 GOP convention, the Republican Party torn in two over Ford and Reagan. Before the speaking began, the California delegation was feeling frisky. Hundreds of delegates started to chant: “RAY-GUNNN!” And the New Mexico delegation would pause a beat and then answer: “Olé!” They kept it up—“Reagan!” “Olé!” Across the floor the New York delegation steamed. They were for Ford. So the next time the Californians bellowed “Reagan,” the New Yorkers, hundreds of them, bellowed back, “Oy vey!” And that went on for a while, too.
That story was told to me by Dick Rosenbaum, head then of the New York GOP. Thinking of it made me remember: the Republican Party has weathered a lot of storms. It has been broken in two and forced, over years, to reheal.
The Waiting Is the Hardest Part
Ground Zero, the floor of the convention, Monday afternoon, 3 p.m. A thousand people mill about and interview each other. Local TV crews interviewing delegates, network stars doing standups in bright lights. Camera flashes. Politicians standing at the podium to see where the prompters have been placed. Scanning the room from left to right: Diane Sawyer and Jon Karl, Romney best friend Bob White, woman in red glittery cowboy hat, more cowboy hats, golf cap, Romney adviser Peter Flaherty, Michael Barone, SKY TV crew, Virginia House of Delegates member Barbara Comstock, Jim Pinkerton. Man in Uncle Sam hat, woman in red-white-and-blue fool’s cap with horns. Delegates: If you want to be interviewed, wear a funny hat. A sea of khaki—the men from the campaign in khaki slacks and blue blazers and scuffed black shoes. You pass from cluster to cluster and hear the interview phrases: “The tough decisions that we need to make,” and “The key is to grow the economy.”
On the floor and in the lobbies, in the shuttle buses, on the sidewalk, this is what you hear: “So what’s going on?” “So whatta ya hear?”
The secret of the convention on its putative first day: Nobody knows anything. Everyone is convinced the convention is happening someplace else, at some secret meeting of important people, at some great lunch. The truth: the convention is 5,000 people in 5,000 rooms watching TV, surfing the Net and texting each other. That’s what it is, 5,000 people in 5,000 pods. You know why they were all on the floor at 3 p.m. Monday? To get out of the room.
The mood of the Republicans? Waiting. What’s going to be the impact of the storm? And, with an edge of bitterness: why exactly did the GOP schedule this thing for hurricane season in Florida? Because they think they’re lucky with hurricanes? And why is there no time for convention afterglow? It used to be one party met in July and the other in August, and there was time enough between the two conventions that people could sort of think about what they’d heard and seen, mull it. The way it is now, the Republicans disband on Friday and the Democrats arrive in Charlotte Sunday. It’s all too close and squished together. Will that make it one big blur?